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Sunday 2009-05-17

Sunday morning I slept in, and then got up and did some work. That is the main reason I went to all the trouble to get the net access - I have a few things I need to finish up this week and wasn't able to get done before the vacation. Things went well with that though. By about 1pm I was ready to head out. I had hoped that Risa would have spent the morning looking up things and deciding what to do, but when I asked her what she wanted to do, she didn't know. She was pretty mad at me.

At any rate, we headed out for lunch. Risa was being difficult, so (because of that?) we ended up at McDonal's where I got to try a Big N' Tasty, a burger that I always liked. Interestingly, they came with pineapple slices also. Neat. I thought we could get pineapple instead of french fries, but not so: you get both! It would probably be a lot healthier if they just let you do the swap right up. It feels kind of stupid to pay extra to have them not give you the fries though.

After lunch Risa was feeling a bit better. We bought some cheap flip-flops at ABC and walked down around on the beach. After a bunch of walking we went back to the hotel, and took a break. I ended up dumping sand all over the place. I should have checked out my rolled-up pants before laying down for a nap.

For dinner I had noticed a Chili's not too far from our hotel, and Risa wanted some Americana flavor, so we headed that way. A bowl of chili and their "make your own dinner" was enough to stuff the both of us. We wanted to check out a "local bar" so I spied a sports bar down a side street. I was interested in catching the end of the Lakers-Rockets series, so we tried that place. It was a small little place, but the people were having a lot of fun. According to the owner (I assume) that day was the place's 15th Anniversary party, and for that reason the beers were only $3 each. Very cheap! But also because of that the crowd, which had been there drinking since about 5pm, was totally nuts. Seemed like a nice group though. I chatted with a guy, Ike, for a bit. He apparently does something with Harley's. I've got his card around here somewhere…

We made it home by about 11pm or so, and to bed by about midnight. By now I had almost completely recovered from my cold, so I finally got a bit of a break there. Earlier in the afternoon I had looked into options, and not wanting a repeat performance of the morning's inexplicable animosity shot at me, I made an appointment to go horseback riding up on the north shore. That means we needed to hit the road at about 7am, and get up at around 6am. But, I made plans so hopefully that means a less hostile day.

(Another) Saturday 2009-05-16

I had arranged for a rental car, not a great deal, but a good enough one through National. We got our choice of about eight cars, none of which Risa really liked, but in the end she took a Chevy HHR. It is a pretty nice SUV-style PT Cruiser knock-off. I probably should have just sprung for more and gotten a convertible, which is what Risa was after.

We drove over to our hotel, the Aston Waikiki Banyan, but we were renting for two weeks from a Japanese-oriented company so the check in was on the 3rd floor instead of the normal place. We sorted all that out and headed up to our room on the 36th floor. It has an amazing ocean view. The place is a bit old - the building was built in the 70s sometime - and it looks a bit old. Most of the electrical fixtures in our place for example are loose. I get the feeling that it isn't the kind of place that Japanese people would like. Usually even older places are better kept than this place. It isn't bad though; just a bit on the older side. For what we are paying - which isn't really all that much, especially given the amazing view - I'm quite happy. Risa doesn't want to use the kitchen though because the pots & pans & plates are a bit dirty. They look fine to me though.

The strange thing is that we have two beds. Separated. Which is a little strange for a newlywed couple I think, but whatever. Turns out it wasn't much of a problem because usually we were exhausted when we got back and just fell asleep anyway. Also, the beds were pretty average, not really so great. And only two pillows. And small ones. There were some more up in the closet, but I didn't even bother to pull one or two down. Too tired.

I was pretty tired, but went out and did some shopping, and arranged to get the broadband option: a broadband over powerlines (a Motorola Clear Wire modem) solution. It wasn't wireless though, just one wired connection. Good thing I had bought an Apple Airport Express the other day. Set all that up and we were good to go. Well, I had to change to a different outlet than the one I originally chose because the outlet was loose and the internet connection was bad. Not surprising. It isn't the best connection, but works well enough.

I also picked up some local beer (Big Wave) for Risa.

In the evening we went out for a walk, checked out the beach, and got some dinner at a Korean BBQ place. It was very good, but not cheap. (Although, now on the second and third days I've noticed that as a theme: things are not cheap here!) I have some pictures of the food around here somewhere (Risa likes taking pictures of food) but it was just regular old good Korean BBQ, so I won't bother to put those up.

We headed home, and I fell asleep immediately. Risa took her time, but I have no idea what she was up to.

Saturday 2009-05-16 Going to Hawaii

These are my notes from our Wedding trip to Hawaii. I plan to post up a blog post for each day and backdate them so they are on the correct date in the calendar. I also notice that I don't really write interesting posts, and stick mostly with just a "what we did, what we ate" kind of approach. That's too bad; I would love to write more interesting, introspective, and emotional entries, but it turns out that I just naturally do a more simple and boring documentation.

We left for Hawaii on Saturday evening, 2009-05-16. Sadly, the day before I started to get sick. At about 3pm in the afternoon I came down with a splitting headache, after having a sore throat all morning. This was bad because I don't like being sick, airplanes usually dry my throat out as it is, and worse, the first two cases of H1N1 Influenza spread by person-to-person contact between people who had not been out of the country had just been confirmed on the news. I was worried that they would not let me out of the country. Or back. Or something.

That evening was pretty tough, but at least we didn't have to leave early. Our flight out wasn't until about 9pm. We did some pre-travel shopping, packed up, and just barely made it to Shinagawa in time to catch our Narita Express. In the end though we made it. The trip through the airport was as usual, but nobody pulled me out or accused me of being sick (even though I was.) We made it on the plane though, no problem.

We flew ANA, which was nice. Very good service. The flight was about 8 hours. I couldn't sleep, but I did watch Gran Turino, a very good movie. They were running a whole Clint Eastwood marathon, with a bunch of his movies. I spent a lot of time playing "Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth" - I only made it through the first two missions. It seems like a pretty good game, but I don't really like real time strategy games. I want to take my time and plan out moves. Basically, I like turn based games. Still, I guess I have to get dragged into the 20th century at some point or another, so I might as well try to get used to the real time strategy paradigm.

The landing was really tough: because of my cold I was congested, so changing altitude was really tough on me. I thought my head was about to explode, or at least my eardrums. I did manage to get through it, although my nose did start bleeding a bit. Great. When we landed in Hawaii, happily, nobody pulled me over for being sick. Maybe I didn't look as bad as I felt.

Awesome Three Wolf Moon Tshirt review at Amazon

I totally need to improve my reviewing skills. These great reviews (the positive and the negative one) and lots of fun. And what a cool shirt.

Shamus Young's PixelCity Screensaver

I'm a big fan of Shamus Young's Twenty Sided Tale blog. It is very well written, generally very interesting, has geeky computer stuff, fun game-related stuff, DRM related ranting, and generally is just a very interesting blog. I don't really know how Shamus does it; it looks like he is married and has N kids where there is an N that exists such that N >= 1, writes funny stuff for his blog, and has very high quality posts overall. I've been trying to make my blog a bit better by emulating some of Shamus' posts: write clearly, use pictures whenever possible, and try to pick interesting topics.

I generally am only able to use pictures, and only then infrequently. But I'm trying. For some really interesting and funny stuff, see the DM of the Rings, an exploration of what Lord of the Rings would look like if it was a Dungeons & Dragons campaign. Very tongue-in-cheek humor.

What I'm interested in publicizing this time though is a very interesting programming project that Shamus took on in the completely unflattering light of the public. Programming is a lot of fun, but you certainly have to be of a certain mindset to enjoy it. In a way, programming is like building a city from the ground up: you have to start out planning the zoning, the roads, the infrastructure, utilities, then the kinds of buildings you need, how to build them, how to manage them, etc. It is even more like building a city from the ground up when you are writing a program about building a city from the ground up, which is exactly what Shamus did. His series on PixelCity starts out with a simple goal: automatically build a city completely algorithmically. Wait, actually that isn't really such a simple goal.

Anyway, start with the link above and read through the whole series. By the time you get to the end you should have a good understanding (from a high level) of what programming projects are like. As a reward, you can download a Windows Screensaver that builds a city for you and then flies you around it. It is seriously cool. He has released the source code to the community, so I expect that a Mac and Linux version will show up soon. If not, that is something that I would be interested in looking into, but until I get my wedding planned and done, I don't have much time for those kinds of projects. I'm lucky to find the time to put out a half-coherent blog post every once in a while.

So, if you are interested in what it looks like, check out this very nice video Shamus posted on YouTube:

Review of the BBC Series Survivors (2008)

I recently watched the BBC Series "Survivors", which is apparently a remake of a 1975 - 1978 British TV show. It came out in 2008 an concerns a virulent flu outbreak that kills off all but about 1% of the population. Put this on the TV and see if you can convince people that it is a documentary on the current state of the H1N1 "Swine Flu" epidemic going on in Britain. You probably won't get too far with it, but it really is a pretty scary presage of what could happen.

I enjoyed the series quite a bit. It has a lot of the flavor of 2006 TV Series Jericho, itself an end-of-the-world descent into de-civilization via not disease but nuclear war. Both deal with similar issues and are a lot of fun. They also both remind me of J. Michael Straczynski's Jeremiah, a TV series about a post-nuclear world where ... Hm, I get the feeling that this could go on a for a while. So I'll cut it out now.

Anyway, I enjoyed Survivors a lot. It has apparently been renewed for a 2009 season, so that is something to look forward to (along with the BBC standby of Doctor Who.)

I usually try to put in a few pictures because I know that people won't read blog posts without them, but I didn't manage to get any pictures this time. Bummer. Just imagine a very empty Britain, like something out of Children of Men, or 28 Days Later or ... wait, I started doing it again.

Setting up an AFP (Apple Filesharing Protocol) on Ubuntu and a Firefly iTunes Media Server

One of the things I've been meaning to do for a while is set up my Ubuntu machine to share out the music I have on it. I run Amarok on the machine and love it, but that doesn't help when I'm super lazy and don't want to reach over for the linux machine keyboard when I have a perfectly good laptop in my lap*. (* Of course, I do have a VNC server set up on the machine so I could VNC in and start up Amarok that way, but it somehow feels like cheating.)

First step in getting the machine to share out music: set up an AFP server do the other machines in the house (mostly Macs) can see it. That was a lot easier than I expected: just follow the instructions on this post. Great! That seemed to work well. I think. I already had samba up and running on the machine and I am guessing that is what is currently showing up in the Finder. I'll check it out on R.'s machine when I can pry her away from it. The one thing that I did do was to change ATALK_MAC_CHARSET to 'MAC_JAPANESE' and ATALK_UNIX_CHARSET to 'UTF8'. It was pointed out over on this Japanese blog entry that that would be a good idea. I also set up a share for my data folder. I was impressed that this went so smoothly because you need to compile the service from source in order to enable encrypted passwords on the server. It went really smoothly though.

Once you have AFP set up, you need to set up Avahi to broadcast the server. This guide is a really nice explanation of how to set up Avahi. So once that is done, you can move on to the next step in the process: and set up Firefly on the system. That setup was also really smooth, with the exception that for some reason, if you change the default password the service does not seem to work. I have no idea why that would be the case, but do have a vague memory of the same thing happening a few months ago when I set it up. Annoying, but not such a big deal. Once I hit up the webpage for the service, set up the proper directory for the music, and did the scan, the share showed up in iTunes just fine. Nice.

My first, and last, Kart Racing Experience

So last Sunday the guys at work set up a Kart racing outing. If you drive from Tokyo to Chiba, about an hour and a half from where R. and live, out in the boondocks, you can find a small Kart Racing track. I have never been Kart racing before, but R. has, and when we were randomly in Italy for 24 hours (bad -- or good -- planning on my part, don't ask) we saw a Kart race and R. was just enthralled. So I thought we should join the group and give it a go. It would be a fun way to spend an Sunday evening.

We drove out there, taking the really amazing Tokyo Aqualine Tunnel and got there a bit early. I didn't know until then, but R.'s Mini Cooper's GPS unit has a TV tuner. So we watched some TV. Also, it has a remote control. Seriously? It is very hard to get any farther than an arm's length away from the GPS unit in that car even if you tried. But still, a remote control. Wow, we are lazy.

Anyway, we had a total of 19 people. That means we had to split into two groups. The fast group, and the slow group. We determined who was in which group by a time trial. Before that we had a 15 minute practice period. I have never ridden in these little carts before, and I'm bad with motion in general. I get car sick easily, I hate landing on airplanes, basically everything at Disney Land or any of those amusement parks makes me throw up, most elevators make me a bit quesy... So sitting a few inches off the ground, zooming around and making hard turns is probably not something that would be good for me. So on the practice laps I was very slow. I wasn't sure if what would happen on the turns. I was worried that taking one at high speed would mean I would flip over. Scary. By about the tenth time I got passed on a corner though, I began to figure out that maybe I wouldn't flip over if I was going a bit quicker through the corners. So on the time trial I gave it more gas, and promptly spun out. My best lap time in the time trial was the second worst time in the whole group, so I was solidly in the second, slow, group.

R. made it into the first, fast group.

The slow group was first. I finally decided that I might as well try to gun it as much as possible. The race was set up for 22 laps. By the third lap I actually figured out that I basically only had to let up on the gas on two corners. I started actually passing people. I went from second to last to first. With five laps to go, I thought I had it won. Then I spun out and fell back to 3rd place. I was just barely able to make it to first place with 3 laps to go. I am honestly really impressed that I managed to do that. Unfortunately, the last five laps or so I was starting to feel pretty ill what with all the cornering and skidding and fast moving and whatnot. So basically after I finished, took the picture with the flag, I got out and felt like throwing up. I didn't though, and I managed to get some water, and about two days later I was feeling find again.

R. did well for her group, came in 4th. As the winner of the slower group, my best lap time was only better than about half of the best lap times of the people in the first group.

All told though, it was a lot of fun. Except for the sick part. I'm glad I was in the second group and not the first, but I know that is not something I will be doing again.

Esther M. Friesner's The Sword of Mary: A Sequel

I posted earlier about the book Psalms of Herod, and generally didn't come away from it with a good impression. The main detraction is that it is not a self-contained book. It just ends, abruptly. It was just by chance that I picked up the sequel, The Sword of Mary: A Sequel (at least the title makes that clear.) I had heard good things about the two books on tor.com in the comments of some thread, and so I picked them up. If you only have the first book though, I think you would be very disappointed. It just ends, halfway through. It would be like you started reading The Fellowship of the Ring (The Lord of the Rings, Part 1) and then that was it. Over. Frodo and Sam break off from the party and head to Mordor on their own with clearly nothing resolved and a lot left to happen. But that is where it ends. So be sure you pick up the second book if you do start this two book series.

That might be easier said than done though: it looks like it is a hard book to get your hands on. I'm conflicted on these two books because they deal very seriously with sexuality, power, sexism, politics and the judiciary (more in the second book than the first) and religion as a foundation for social order. These aren't fluffy summer-reading topics, and a lot of the world described in the books is grim and downright depressing. I think they are interesting in that it highlights some issues with blindly following through with tradition without thinking and analyzing it, but the two books seem a bit on the salacious side. I have to admit though that I did enjoy the story and by the end was rooting for the (initially quite annoying) protagonist. Friesner has also done a very nice job of world-building; she obviously put a lot of thought into the economics, politics, and control structures of her world. She doesn't go in depth into the history of her world, but it is hinted at, and I like how you get the feeling that there is the thought and complexity behind the world in the books.

The ending of Mary's Sword is also a bit abrupt, but is satisfying. I did enjoy the story though, and while I had a tough time getting into Psalms of Herod, The Sword of Mary picked up a lot quicker. It should though, because it already had an entire book to set it up!

So, a mixed review. If you invested time in Psalms of Herod though, you really should finish it out with The Sword of Mary.

iPhoto 09's Faces Feature

I recently bought iLife 09 and have been using the Faces feature in iPhoto a lot. The Faces feature will look through all your pictures and identify people's faces. Then you can put a name to the face, and gradually iPhoto learns to spot pictures of that person. It is an amazing feature. Facial recognition has been a promised feature from Artificial Intelligence since the 80s, and this (along with Picasa's Name Tags) is the first really commercial product that I have seen facial recognition in. Since I'm a computer scientist by trade, I'm well aware of how these kinds of things work beneath the covers, and while there has been some press coverage saying that this feature isn't ready for mass release, I disagree. I think it does a good job, has a great interface, and more than that, is really fun to use. I find that once I put a name to a face, I want to go through and see what other pictures I can find that the person is in. I also have been adding metadata to my pictures in some way (going back to file name for really old pictures) that show who is in a picture, so it is interesting to see how well iPhoto compares to my tags.

Once you have added a bunch of names to faces, iPhoto has a nice cork-board of faces that you can click on to find all pictures they are in, or have iPhoto show you more pictures that it thinks they might be in. Adding names to faces is very easy. When you see a picture, you hit the "Name" button and then get a picture like the one to the left. People who have a known name have their name below their face, and for people whose name isn't known you see either "unnamed" or iPhoto asking "Is this X?" where X is someone you have already named. It is really impressive. iPhoto does a very good job of noticing faces - it doesn't always notice all faces, but it gets most of them - and it does a good job of suggesting names when it thinks it might know who someone is.

Once you have named a few people and they show up on the list of faces, you can easily scan through lots of pictures and confirm or deny iPhoto's guesses. You can go through and quickly click once to confirm a face, or twice to deny it. You can also name a guess as someone else with a control-click if it threw someone else into the list of guesses. It makes it really easy to go through and check all the pictures iPhoto thinks someone might be in. Then once you have done a round of confirmation and rejection it will re-search the database for more pictures. Getting it to get down to zero suggestions for each person is addictive. Of course, even if there are no more suggestions, that does not mean that all pictures of that person have been found. If you are going through yourself and find some untagged pictures, you can tag them and then iPhoto will do more guessing based on the new data point. For obsessive compulsive people you might stuck in a loop where you want to go through every picture and make sure that everyone is named. That might not be a good thing...

iPhoto is also wrong sometimes, and guess that strange things might be faces. In the middle picture on the right, names have been blurred to protect the innocent and stomach-face-bearing people. Also, iPhoto doesn't know when a face is a human, or whether it is just a face-like object to sometimes hilarious results.

Things that disappoint me about this feature in iPhoto: there should be better intergration with the Address Book. After a software update, iPhoto will suggest people from your address book, which is great. It does this based mostly on email addresses to keep track of people, so you can add someone's email address from address book and you won't get duplicate name suggestions. I wish that in address book though that it would know about the faces in iPhoto and you could get the faces gallery on the Address Book entry. As it is now, you have to go into iPhoto yourself, pic a picture, then drag it over to Address Book. You also lose the nice face cropping that iPhoto does for you. That's too bad. I hope that in future updates that put that kind of functionality into Address Book.

Another issue is that iPhoto 09 adds Flickr and Facebook support, but at least in Flickr it doesn't look like they send the extra faces meta-data. They should make a Flickr "note" around the face with the name, or at least put a list of the recognized people into the photo. As it is now I feel like I have to go in and manually type the names into the description field, which is exactly what I was trying to automate out of the picutre. (uh, no pun intended.) I haven't checked if they do that for Facebook yet. Also the upload interface isn't as nice as what I have been using, Connected Flow's Flickr Export. That has a lot more options and gives you a much better update on upload progress. I'll probably keep using it since I prefer it - you can create new sets with a description and it just generally is more powerful.

Otherwise I am really happy with Faces. It is a fun way to spend time going through your old pictures. I'm afraid that now I'm addicted to trying to name everybody that has ever been in one of my digital photos...